The upcoming Australian election will be an illustration of how most Western elections will play out in the near future
Australian voters go to the polls next Saturday – voting in this country is compulsory, unlike in most Western democracies – but this is not a task that the electorate is looking forward to with any degree of enthusiasm, let alone optimism.
The choice that confronts the electorate is a bleak one – one commentator has fittingly described this election as “the most dismal in decades.”
Serious policy debate has been non-existent, with both leaders happy to offer meagre handouts to voters – an electricity price reduction from Prime Minister Albanese and a petrol price reduction from Conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton.
The first term Albanese Labor government has, from any rational viewpoint, proved to be a rank failure and does not deserve to be re-elected – and any competent opposition leader should have been able to win this election easily and dispatch Labor to the opposition benches.
Cost-of-living pressures have increased exponentially over the past three years – energy and food prices have skyrocketed, and house prices and rents in the major cities are now far beyond what ordinary wage earners in this country can afford to pay.
This, according to every poll, is the major issue troubling voters – and the Albanese government has done absolutely nothing to alleviate it.
Australian voters intuitively know, even if they are reluctant to admit it, that both the incumbent Labor government and the Conservative Liberal/National party opposition are incapable of alleviating the cost-of-living crisis. In fact, during the election campaign, both leaders have been reduced to telling outright lies (for example, that heavily subsidized renewable energy projects lead to lower energy prices) about how they will solve the crisis. The electorate’s escalating disenchantment with both major parties should come as no surprise to either Albanese or Dutton.
As yet, however, no political alternative has emerged that offers voters a way out (no matter how illusory) of this seemingly intractable impasse. Australia, in this respect, appears to be a decade or so behind Donald Trump’s America, Nigel Farage’s UK and Marine Le Pen’s France.
Both major parties in Australia are firmly committed to policies that favor the ruling global elites – with the result that the gap between the economic ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ will only grow wider in the future as the cost-of-living crisis intensifies.
This is hardly surprising, given that Australia has always been a colonial political and economic satrap state of both the UK and the US.
So dependent still is Australia on these waning and decrepit colonial empires – they differ only in the way they enforce their respective colonial hegemonies – that our current head of state is King Charles III, and our economic overlords remain, in the apt words of Woody Guthrie, the “money grubbing racket boys” of Wall Street.
What then are we to make of next week’s election?
If almost all recent polls are to be believed, the inept Albanese Labor government appears to be on track to be re-elected with an increased majority.
How is this altogether surprising state of affairs to be explained?
It cannot be explained by the “achievements” of the Albanese government because, as intelligent Labor supporters know, there have been no achievements. Nor can it be explained by Albanese’s political skills or charisma – he is completely lacking in both – although perhaps his dogged blandness and non-threatening demeanor appeal to some voters.
Nor can it be explained by opposition leader Peter Dutton’s gross political incompetence, his brief flirtation with Trump that backfired disastrously when tariffs were imposed and the stock market crashed (Canada’s Liberal leader did not make this mistake), or the fact that he has run probably the worst election campaign in Australian political history.
The answer lies rather in the inability of the conservative opposition to formulate an effective alternative political agenda to that of the Labor party – and this failure arises not from Dutton’s manifold personal shortcomings, but from the fundamental ideological division at the heart of all mainstream conservative parties in the West.
A deep-seated ideological division has emerged over the past few decades within these parties: between those adhering to traditional middle-class values (individual autonomy, individual rights, the rule of law, a traditional definition of the family, etc.) and those that have embraced the newer woke ideologies of the emerging global elites (catastrophic climate change, identity politics, DEI, transgender rights, etc). This division has both economic and cultural aspects, and in the UK it was intensified by the Brexit referendum.
This ideological division has caused serious ongoing instability within all mainstream conservative parties in the West – in Australia and the UK, for example, these parties have been characterized by endless leadership coups that eventually led voters to throw them out of office in recent years.
One important consequence of this ideological division is that mainstream conservative parties cannot wholeheartedly and openly attack woke global ideologies with any degree of vigor – because many of their politicians and supporters firmly subscribe to such views.
It is this issue that has crippled Dutton’s election campaign.
The Murdoch press and other conservative commentators have constantly urged Dutton to come out and explicitly attack dominant woke ideologies – that is, to adopt a fully-fledged Trump-like populist political agenda.
Dutton, however, has refused to do so – because it is simply impossible for him to do so within the framework of the mainstream conservative political party that he so tenuously leads.
If he tried to, he would alienate a large segment of his own party as well as a sizable component of conservative voters – thereby causing the coalition parties to split. More importantly, no traditional mainstream political party that is serious about winning an election can at present afford to openly attack dominant global ideologies – a majority of voters adhere to them, and no mainstream party can win office if it alienates a significant segment of these voters.
Dutton, therefore, has found himself in an impossible position.
This was graphically illustrated in one of the recent televised debates, when a journalist asked Dutton if he believed in climate change. Dutton responded by saying “I will leave that to the scientists” – notwithstanding that the opposition is committed to the Paris accords and net zero.
This non-answer, of course, pleased no one. It alienated those conservative and undecided voters who firmly believe in climate change ideology – but it also alienated those conservative voters who believe that the climate change ideology has had lasting and pernicious economic effects.
In refusing to take a firm stand on this key issue, Dutton appears to stand for nothing. Does he really think that disgruntled voters who cannot afford to pay their electricity bills believe that climate change is just a matter for the scientists?
It must surely be obvious to Dutton that, in order to win over those disaffected voters who have been left behind by globalization and who are being increasingly marginalized by the cost-of-living crisis, he has to openly attack dominant woke ideologies like catastrophic climate change – because it is precisely these voters who completely reject, for very sound economic and cultural reasons, such elite doctrines.
This, however, is Dutton’s dilemma – in order to differentiate the opposition from Labor and attract the increasing number of disaffected voters, Dutton is obliged to openly attack dominant woke ideologies, but, as the leader of a mainstream conservative party, he simply cannot do so.
Dutton’s dilemma is also UK opposition leader Kemi Badenoch’s dilemma – and it is a dilemma that right-wing commentators who urge mainstream conservative party leaders to miraculously transform themselves into Trump-like populists utterly fail to understand.
These commentators also fail to appreciate that, apart from the difficulties described above, two further insurmountable problems face conservative leaders seeking to instantly morph into populists – they would have to adopt an isolationist foreign policy stance, and they would have to at least pretend to represent the interests of the displaced working class.
Dutton – just like Badenoch – is, however, a fervent Cold War warrior (fiercely anti-Russian and anti-Chinese) and a supporter of the Zelensky regime in Ukraine, as well as being a strident opponent of moderate trade union demands (he even consistently opposes basic wage increases).
Trump, of course, can readily promise to end the conflict in Ukraine and accept endorsement from the head of the Teamsters Union – policy stances utterly impossible for a conservative leader like Dutton to even contemplate.
If the above analysis is correct, and, as nearly all the polls predict, Dutton loses next week’s election, it follows that the conservative coalition in Australia will have no viable long-term future – in much the same way that the UK Conservative party appears to be doomed to political oblivion in the near future. This week’s local elections in the UK will be an important indicator of that party’s fate.
If the Albanese government is returned to office with a majority, as seems likely, Dutton will no doubt be deposed as leader, but in fairness to Dutton, his shadow cabinet colleagues – who he has wisely kept hidden away during the election campaign – are all far less competent politicians than he is.
There is, of course, an alternative scenario – one that mirrors the recent emergence of populist parties in other Western democracies – namely that the coalition parties will split and the right-wing segments of the Liberal and National parties will coalesce to form a new, genuinely populist party with a radically different political program.
This is a distinct possibility – although it may take some time to eventuate and would involve a significant amount of blood-letting and political disruption.
A new populist party would face a revitalized Labor party – energized by winning an election under an uninspiring leader that it did not deserve to win – but still firmly committed to elite ideologies and programs that can only deepen the cost-of-living crisis that continues to brutally divide Australia.
If the conservative coalition’s dilemma is that it cannot attack elite ideologies and programs, the Labor party’s dilemma (much like that of the Democratic party in America and the UK Labour party) is that it is firmly and irretrievably committed to them.
Whatever the consequences of next Saturday’s election it is safe to predict that the chronic ongoing instability that has characterized Australian politics for the past few decades – and politics in the West more generally – will only intensify.
In that sense nothing much will change – and there is a more fundamental historical continuity in the Australian context at work here.
In 1964, Donald Horne, a prominent Australian intellectual, wrote a book titled “The Lucky Country” in which he described Australia as follows: “Australia is a lucky country ruled mainly by second-rate people… It lives on other people’s ideas, and although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders… lack curiosity about the events that surround them.”
Horne could easily have been writing about Dutton and Albanese and next Saturday’s federal election.
